The invention relates to the glass industry. More particularly, the invention relates to the counting of arrays of glass sheets or “lites”.
In the glass industry, there is a need to count the number of lites in various arrays of lites. The arrays may be vertical stacks or horizontal arrays of lites (e.g., with portions exposed through the top of a carton, crate, or other storage container). Various lite-counting apparatus have been suggested in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,298,790, 4,771,443, and 5,457,312.
It has been proposed to import technology used to count optical disks. Exemplary optical disk counter technology is found in U.S. Pat. No. 6,683,321. It has been proposed to use the technology of the '321 patent count lites. Specifically, it has been proposed to configure such a counter to accommodate corners of the lites along an edge of the array and drive the laser and detector from such a unit along the edge to count the lites. Nevertheless, there remains room for improvement in the counting of lites.